I think we're certainly going to see slim versions of both mid-gen consoles once they can be manufactured on the 7nm node.
The thing that I wonder about though, is whether we'll see a super slim PS4 and XBoxOne. If so, how cheap could they get? Final PS3 cheap?
For X1X, once you've slimmed down to a ~200 mm^2 chip and dropped to six memory chips, you have to wonder what benefit there'd be to making an even slimmer X1S with climbing prices for the 16 DDR3 chips, an IO limited minimum die area and legacy issues like the HDMI pass through, same cost 4K BR drive, almost same cost HDD ... Hopefully they'll sweep away everything else when they shrink, ditch the HDMI pass through and go for a lean, mass market device.
If Sony are planning a new system around 2019 / 2020, I wonder if it's wise to flood the market with both a shrunk PS4 and PS4Pro. I think they'd be better off picking one - hopefully the Pro - and making it their base machine and then go with a new high end BC device. The larger PS4 Pro chip might be a better shrinking candidate for 7nm than the PS4 Amateur, and 7 gHz GDDR5 should be as cheap as chip by 2019.
It may not be worth it for MS to do another Durango iteration as the sooner developers can ditch eSRAM the better (stop prolonging it).
It would be pretty cute if both Sony and MS did do it and take advantage of the process node for even higher clocks - boost mode without needing to buy the Pro, although that'd probably overlap too much into 4Pro's & Scorpio's non-patched advantages. A CPU clock bump would still be useful for general OS updates later down the road for the low-price-late-comers should the console companies decide to prolong the generation with 2013 APU specs.
With X1S, MS pushed the GPU clocks but kept the CPU where it was. I think a shrunk X1X would be wise to follow the same pattern, where Scorpio / X1X can be the baseline for all software going forward. And, as you say, start to move past X1 and its development quirks.
A cost reduced PS4Pro might make a good entry level machine, with its faster CPU - as you say - and its 4K output.
Of note is that the leaked description of the first PS4 idea was that it was based on Steamroller, which means the two architectures were close enough and that Sony almost went with it.
Carrizo's design focused more on the lower power envelope and density, and a single Excavator module was actually much smaller than a Jaguar one. At 14.5mm2, even increasing its L2 back up to 2MB would leave it far below the 26.2 mm2 Jaguar. I would think there would be little doubt Excavator would be vastly superior to the Jaguar modules that were used in the consoles, although it may not be fair since Excavator had more advanced implementation methods that if back-ported could have helped.
A fair amount of what goes into improving the CPU for Scorpio is likely bound up in the uncore being faster and wider, with bandwidth to match memory more closely and the northbridge clock paired with the upclocked GPU.
The one specific change noted for the CPU architecture appears to have been an increase in its ability to manage or cache guest to host translations under the always-virtualized OS setup. They gave a decent figure of improvement for operations related to that subset, though I haven't tracked down where I saw that. That specific corner of the design is something I would wonder if the more server-oriented Bulldozer line might have been better with from the beginning.
Jay has beat me to it, but it was Hotchips. Anand have a report on the presentation:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1174...x-scorpio-engine-live-blog-930am-pt-430pm-utc
In addition to the new page descriptor cache, they also mention a 4X increase in the number of L2 TLB entries.
The impact of trebling the number of memory channels over the X1 would be interesting to know in terms of running actual game applications. Come to think of it, aren't PS4/PS4Pro only four channels too?